Meet the Author Philip La Croix , Book writing Experince

I’m  Philip La Croixa newly published author, but I have been a performer all my life. I graduated from California State University Fullerton with my bachelors in the Theatre Arts and have spent the last 15 years performing as a Knight for Medieval Times. My job as a knight is too much fun to give up entirely, but I’m trying to shift my career focus over to writing because I have many thrilling stories to share with the world!

Growing up, I actually didn’t have much interest in books, but after I graduated from college (when I was no longer required to read) I found the joys of staring at paper and hallucinating for hours on end. One night, I had an incredibly vivid dream and felt a need to get it down on paper. It was then that I realized that writing stories is the ultimate acting experience because you have to act and think as every character you create, as well as keeping your audience captivated by telling the story of what those characters are going through.

“The Best Laid Traps” Is the story about a young man, Edward Dalton, who’s been bullied all his life and gets run off the road and left for dead in the Appalachian wilderness. He spends 6 years battling starvation, local wildlife, and his own poisoned mind to survive. After he makes a valuable discovery in his wooded sanctuary, he decides to leave the forest and go back to civilization to carry out his wildest dreams of revenge on the three people who had left him to die. He soon finds that fate has been kind to his bullies while he was away and Edward plans and waits for 10 years until he can orchestrate the perfect moment to brutally take them down and show to the world just how horrible they really are.

As far as getting the initial Idea goes, random thoughts pop into my head and either I have gotten an idea for a new story, or another part of a current story has just been revealed. When these thoughts occur, it’s kind of like being hypnotized because all of the sudden I’ll come out of these musings and have huge chunks of time missing. They say that writing is less of an act of creating everything in your stories, but rather watching what happens in your head and writing the events down exactly as you saw them. I certainly agree! Although you have to create every little detail in the beginning, it doesn’t take long before the characters start taking on a life of their own and you move from driver to passenger in the speeding bullet train that is storytelling.

It’s very easy to get stuck and say to yourself, “I’ll just take today off and come back to it tomorrow.” But what happens when the same thing happens the next day? If you don’t push past the block, the proverbial “tomorrow” never comes and your wonderful story becomes dead in the water. If you know the general direction of where your story is headed, push past the part where you’re stuck and get back on track; even if it’s the flimsiest get-out-of-jail free fix you can think of. It’s a lot better to go back and fix that area later after you have a complete story than to sit there waiting for your own deus ex machina.

As I mentioned before. You go into a story with a certain idea of how you want your characters. You guide them in the beginning but sometimes they end up being completely different than what you thought at first. For example, in the story I’m currently weighting, there’s a funny little creature that kept nagging at the back of my mind. I tried to leave him out of the story entirely because I thought he was too comical to fit in the story I’m trying to tell, but he was insistent. I have no idea how long he’ll be in the story, but I have a feeling he’s going to have a pivotal role at a crucial moment. The overall story for the book just comes to me and I have to pursue it. It doesn’t matter what type of genre or length, the story needs to be told and the writer must follow.

Well, the first book I published is an action adventure. The one I’m working on is a dark-fantasy. I have plans for sci-fi, dramas, etc. I’m really all over the board. I even wrote a full length fan-fiction novel surrounding characters from “The Hunger Games” universe. I really hope that one day I can get a copy in front of Suzanne Collins and if not get her endorsement, then to at least have her permission to publish it.

My current novel centers around the characters from L. Frank Baum’s original novel of “The Wizard of Oz.” It takes place many years after the story, and paints a different picture of what happened at the end of L. Frank Baum’s version. Instead of sending her home, Glinda traps Dorothy to keep her in stasis while she deals with a mysterious gloom or poisoning of the land of Oz, stemming from the great wizard himself. Glinda disappears and Dorothy finally breaks out and has to take up Glinda’s mantle to try and put everything back to rights. It’s kind of like “Wizard of Oz” meets “Shutter Island” and has been very exciting to write because it has so many huge twists and turns and an ending that I think will blow your mind, at least it did for me.

My marketing campaign manager Josh Mitchell was kind enough to bring you guys to my attention and am very grateful he did so. Thank you all for your hard work and help for all the writers out there.